> Most developers who hate PHP hate it out of elitism or ignorance. Either way it’s dumb. You have to choose a technology based on what you need. PHP is highly useful and powerful in many scenarios. And taking it out of the equation just because of its reputation is not a good idea. When I conduct hiring interviews, one of the questions I like to ask regardless of the language for the position, is the developer opinion on PHP. It's not uncommon for some to start massive rant based on outdated

I think there's something people miss when looking at PHP as a system - the fact that it's a collection of hot swappable logic modules (pages) PHP pages themselves can download packages of additional PHP pages and extend functionality as the website runs. For example the user can install a message board from the UI in WordPress, and PHP files themselves will download additional PHP files needed for a message board, and boom your site now has a message board - no recompile, install, or deploy.

There was a tech talk I saw on Youtube a few years ago that I really liked that argued that Facebook succeeded because of PHP, not despite it. IIRC, the main argument was that despite its flaws, PHP has one killer feature, which is that it lets you have really tight iteration loops for web development. This made developing in PHP extremely productive. I searched around for the video, but couldn't find it.

I know it's cool to hate PHP but I can think of other languages (Perl, VB6, Groovy) I dislike more. For a language to be so hated it has to be used a lot, and that's the primary virtue of PHP: it runs damn-near everywhere. Not only web scripting/apps but you can use it for shell scripting, Lambda/Azure Functions... there are even frameworks for creating native mobile applications with PHP. And I wouldn't be surprised if it compiles to JavaScript as well.

That "article" spent half its time leading up to explaining why PHP is bad and half its height on GIANT MEMES. The actual content was half a paragraph about how PHP lacks strong conformity... needless waste of bits